Karl Barth was the most prolific theologian of the twentieth century. Avoiding simple paraphrasing, Dr Gorringe places the theology in its social and political context, from the First World War through to the Cold War by following Barth's intellectual development through the years that saw the rise of national socialism and the development of communism. Barth initiated a theological revolution in his two Commentaries on Romans, begun during the First World War. His attempt to deepen this during the turbulent (...) years of the Weimar Republic made him a focus of theological resistance to Hitler after the rise to power of the Nazi party. Expelled from Germany, he continued to defy fashionable opinion by refusing to condemn communism after the Second World War. Drawing on a German debate largely ignored by Anglo-Saxon theology Dr Gorringe shows that Barth responds to the events of his time not just in his occasional writings, but in his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics. In conclusion Dr Gorringe asks what this admittedly patriarchal author still has to contribute to contemporary theology, and in particular human liberation. (shrink)

This book is also concerned with world economics, but it is approached from the viewpoint of ethics. It argues that the hubris of the present global market is destroying communities and wreaking irrevocable damage to the planet: we live in a modern version of the Midas myth.Justice in its broadest sense -- fair shares for all -- is eloquently held up as the prime virtue of human communities. Timothy Gorringe, Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Exeter, (...) offers practical suggestions for an ethical transformation to replace the spiraling profit-driven economy with a steady-state economy that meets human needs and encompasses the well-being of other species and the environment. (shrink)

This essay suggests that changes in economic practices which we associate with capitalism brought about deep changes in understandings of culture, and especially of Christianity; that, given that capitalism is driving global warming, changes in the way in which we structure the economy, which for many of us have religious roots, will have to be adopted if we are going to survive; that six priorities for an alternative economy may be identified.

The concern to learn and profit from the past experience of exile and restoration and to implement the command “Be holy as I am holy” underlies both the dialogue of Job and later Pharisaic theology; to reflect on one is to clarify the other.

The paper argues, first, that the range of problems confronting humanity constitutes a global emergency; next, that this cannot be addressed by moral exhortation but by the building of ‘arks’; finally, that community, cultivation of the virtues, and place may be considered key aspects of such ark building.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Common Good and the Global Emergency: God and the Built Environment by T. J. GorringeLibby GibsonThe Common Good and the Global Emergency: God and the Built Environment T. J. Gorringe New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 309 pp. $90.00Building on arguments set forth in A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, and Redemption (2002), theologian Timothy Gorringe begins The Common Good and the (...) Global Emergency by exploring whether an idea of the common good is relevant in a multicultural society and, if so, how an account of the common good can give rise to an alternative economic paradigm grounded in grace. While respect for cultural differences and the rise of individualism may argue against a robust understanding of the common good, Gorringe looks to the concept of oikonomia, or household management, to express the concept of managing “our affairs in such a way as to further what we perceive to be good ends” (35). Since our understanding of the economy shapes every aspect of the built environment, Gorringe traces local, regional, and national economies to what Wendell Berry calls “the great economy” or God’s creation, redemption, and sustenance of all things.Gorringe grounds his arguments about the common good in his Trinitarian theology of the built environment, expressed as God the Creator, God the Reconciler, and God the Redeemer. The triune perichoretic nature of God is inherently relational; therefore, as humans made in God’s image, we cannot ignore our interdependence. While God the Creator offers a sense of the common good springs from creation, God the Reconciler gives Gorringe traction to discuss the many barriers—race, gender, class, and space—that divide human beings and how our built environments structure these separations. God the Redeemer is concerned with empowering human beings to challenge all things that destroy life; thus Gorringe sees his project as contributing a theology of liberation committed to justice and fullness of life for all humans.Gorringe argues that our best chance to identify a common good rests on constructively addressing the common bad that he calls the global emergency. This emergency can be seen in the doubling of the world’s population in the past forty years, the problem of climate change, and global resource depletion. Seeing climate change and food, water, and energy issues as among the most pressing ethical issues of the coming decades, Gorringe challenges the reader to examine how our current common values have degraded the environment [End Page 202] and the lives of people worldwide. Since he specifically addresses the built environment, Gorringe’s purview is necessarily anthropocentric and justified by the doctrine of incarnation. Yet the Creator God expresses great wisdom in the laws of nature, and much could be learned from the “built” environments in the animal kingdom. While this line of thought would clearly depart from the rigorous academic method of Gorringe’s analysis, the book arose from a feeling that the Lord instructed him to continue working in this area, and attending to other nonrational sources of wisdom could greatly enhance our understanding of God’s grace in all the world.Gorringe acknowledges that the chapters do not unfold linearly, and that he seeks to point out points of confluence. The fluidity with which he addresses theological, political, economic, architectural, sociological, and ethical issues leads the reader to an overall picture of the common good and its powers to liberate us from injustice while an exact map of this process may be difficult to draw. Gorringe clearly and directly addresses both critics and supporters of his previous work on the built environment and solidifies his case for attending to the ways that our built environments could express a common good, grounded in grace, that allows for the fullness of life for all beings.Libby GibsonVirginia Theological SeminaryCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

The paper clarifies and defends the orthodox view that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are vacuously true against recent criticisms. It argues that apparent counterexamples to orthodoxy result from uncritical reliance on a fallible heuristic used in the processing of conditionals. A comparison is developed between such counterpossibles and vacuously true universal generalizations.

The philosophical relevance of experimental psychology is hard to dispute. Much more controversial is the so‐called negative program's critique of armchair philosophical methodology, in particular the reliance on ‘intuitions’ about thought experiments. This chapter responds to that critique. It argues that, since the negative program has been forced to extend the category of intuition to ordinary judgments about real‐life cases, the critique is in immediate danger of generating into global scepticism, because all human judgments turn out to depend on intuitions. (...) Recently, some proponents of the negative program have tried to demarcate the target of their critique more narrowly. However, their attempts are still far too indiscriminate, and over‐generate scepticism. Nevertheless, once experimental philosophy has refined its own methodology, it may contribute to the refinement of the methodology of mainstream philosophy, by filtering out the effects of cognitive bias, although it offers no prospect of doing without judgments on real or imaginary cases. (shrink)

Understandably absorbed in technical details, discussion of the semantic paradoxes risks losing sight of broad methodological principles. This chapter sketches a general approach to the comparison of rival logics, and applies it to argue that revision of classical propositional logic has much higher costs than its proponents typically recognize.

This article endeavors to identify the strongest versions of the two primary arguments against epistemic scientific realism: the historical argument—generally dubbed “the pessimistic meta-induction”—and the argument from underdetermination. It is shown that, contrary to the literature, both can be understood as historically informed but logically validmodus tollensarguments. After specifying the question relevant to underdetermination and showing why empirical equivalence is unnecessary, two types of competitors to contemporary scientific theories are identified, both of which are informed by science itself. With the (...) content and structure of the two nonrealist arguments clarified, novel relations between them are uncovered, revealing the severity of their collective threat against epistemic realism and its “no-miracles” argument. The final section proposes, however, that the realist’s axiological tenet “science seeks truth” is not blocked. An attempt is made to indicate the promise for a nonepistemic, purely axiological scientific realism—here dubbed “Socratic scientific realism.”. (shrink)

This chapter aims to attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. It deals with a few sketchy remarks on the historiography of recent analytic philosophy. Writing in 1981, David Lewis described “a reasonable goal for a philosopher” as bringing one’s opinions into stable equilibrium. A natural comparison is between Lewis’s Quinean or at least post‐Quinean methodology and the methodology of Peter Strawson, Quine’s leading opponent from the tradition of ordinary language (...) philosophy. Analytic epistemology provides a good case study of the philosophical application of Gricean pragmatics outside the philosophy of language. On Michael Dummett picture of the history of philosophy, Descartes had made epistemology first philosophy, the engine for the rest of philosophy, and then Frege had replaced epistemology by the philosophy of language as first philosophy. The chapter suggests that philosophy sometimes already uses an abductive methodology and ought to use it more in the future. (shrink)

This article argues that heuristics play a key role in philosophy, in generating both our verdicts on proposed counterexamples to philosophical theories and philosophical paradoxes. Heuristics are efficient ways of answering questions, quick and easy to use, but imperfectly reliable. They have been studied by psychologists and cognitive scientists such as Gigerenzer and Kahneman, but their relevance to philosophical methodology has not been properly recognized. Several heuristics are discussed at length. The persistence heuristic can be summarized in the slogan ‘Small (...) changes don’t matter’. Without it, updating would present an intractable problem for both natural and artificial intelligence. But our reliance on the persistence heuristic also makes us vulnerable to paradoxes of vagueness. Disquotational heuristics of various kinds are considered. They play central roles in our ascriptions of truth, falsity, and belief, but they also generate semantic paradoxes such as the Liar and Frege puzzles about coreference. The use of an additive heuristic for combining reasons is also discussed. Our reliance on fallible heuristics in philosophy does not make philosophical knowledge impossible, just as our reliance on fallible heuristics in perception does not make perceptual knowledge impossible. Nevertheless, it should motivate us to take a more critical attitude to our data. By identifying and analyzing the heuristics on which we rely, we may be able to work out where they make us most vulnerable to error. (shrink)

The Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Literature identifies key resources for topics important to the theory and practice of lesbian and gay politics, literature, religion, and more. The book contains hundreds of entries that summarize key issues at stake and then identify (mostly) book-length analysis of this topics. The topics range from activism, to age of consent, to legal history as well as individual entries on key authors and regional areas.

Gilbert (2015) warns us that advisory brain implant systems—neural implants that predict brain activity and give the user advice based on those predictions—could threaten the user's autonomy. If th...

We discuss two general issues concerning diverging sets of Bayesian (conditional) probabilities—divergence of “posteriors”—that can result with increasing evidence. Consider a setof probabilities typically, but not always, based on a set of Bayesian “priors.” Incorporating sets of probabilities, rather than relying on a single probability, is a useful way to provide a rigorous mathematical framework for studying sensitivity and robustness in Classical and Bayesian inference. See: Berger (1984, 1985, 1990); Lavine (1991); Huber and Strassen (1973); Walley (1991); and Wasserman and (...) Kadane (1990). Also, sets of probabilities arise in group decision problems. See: Levi (1982); and Seidenfeld, Kadane, and Schervish (1989). Third, sets of probabilities are one consequence of weakening traditional axioms for uncertainty. See: Good (1952); Smith (1961); Kyburg (1961); Levi (1974); Fishburn (1986); Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (1990); and Walley (1991). (shrink)

Colburn (computer science, U. of Minnesota-Duluth) has a doctorate in philosophy and an advanced degree in computer science; he's worked as a philosophy professor, a computer programmer, and a research scientist in artificial intelligence. Here he discusses the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence; the new encounter of science and philosophy (logic, models of the mind and of reasoning, epistemology); and the philosophy of computer science (touching on math, abstraction, software, and ontology).

A case in point is Frank Jackson’s talk of “conceptual possibility” and “conceptual necessity.” He writes as if the issue between us is the relative methodological priority for philosophy of conceptual modalities and metaphysical modalities. In addition to the uncritical reliance on conceptual modality, another fallacy is surfacing. Paul Boghossian developed an epistemology of logic based on understanding‐assent links corresponding to fundamental rules of logic. His paradigm was modus ponens: a necessary condition for understanding “if” was supposed to be willingness (...) to assent to inferences by modus ponens involving “if.” Boghossian objects that Simon’s tolerance of assent to gappy statements undermines the presumption that he is assenting to them as true. In Nenad Miscevic paper, such competencies are postulated for the linguistic, spatial‐geometric, mathematical, metaphysical, epistemological, and moral domains. Thus Miscevic auxiliary modularity‐independent characterization offers little help in demarcating a useful category of intuition. (shrink)

Things in common: an introduction -- Life -- Specters -- Subscendence -- Species -- Kindness.

This chapter argues that the ordinary cognitive capacity to handle counterfactual conditionals carries with it the cognitive capacity to handle metaphysical modality. It aims to illustrate with examples our cognitive use of counterfactual conditionals, and sketches an epistemology for such conditionals. The chapter explains how they subsume metaphysical modality, and assesses the consequences for the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. It discusses the relation between metaphysical possibility and the restricted kinds of possibility that seem more relevant to (...) ordinary life. Philosophers’ ascriptions of metaphysical modality are far more deeply rooted in our ordinary cognitive practices than most skeptics about it realize. Many philosophers are more confident in their judgments about more or less realistic thought experiments in epistemology and moral philosophy than about more radically strange ones in metaphysics. Philosophical controversy will naturally make the unclear cases salient. (shrink)

Moore’s sympathies are anti‐realist. As an example of an antirealist account of truth, he gives what he calls “the Wittgensteinian View” of truth for mathematical discourse. In attempting to show how to “sidestep certainly apparently decisive objections” to the Wittgensteinian View, Moore acquiesces in the charge that it makes the consistency of a mathematical theory a matter of stipulation: we adopt a rule “that guarantees the consistency of Peano Arithmetic.” Moore’s main concern is the defensibility of anti‐realist view of philosophical (...) discourse. In “Williamson’s Philosophy of Philosophy”, Paul Horwich defends the idea that the proper business of philosophy is clarification rather than systematic theory‐building. In political philosophy, it would be hard to mount a credible defense of some system of government without considering what effects it causally explains. In terms of Diego Marconi’s clear version of Wittgenstein’s account, it is straightforward to explain why it is no longer a live option for so many philosophers. (shrink)

'Knowledge and its Limits' starts its exposition of the knowledge-first approach to epistemology with a structural analogy between knowledge and action as the two key relations between mind and world (Williamson 2000: 1, 6-8). This chapter aims to reconsider the relation between knowledge and action, and refine the analogy.

This chapter explores some general aspects of the tension between one’s role as a believer and one’s role as an appraiser of oneself as a believer in philosophy. The proposal is to replace true belief by knowledge in a principle of charity constitutive of content. Knowledge maximization need not make the ascription of knowledge come too cheap. By contrast, Davidson’s principle of charity gives good marks to an interpretation for having Stone Age people assent to many truths of quantum mechanics, (...) if it happens to fit the compositional structure of their language. Perhaps the underlying worries about knowledge maximization can be captured in a more abstract form. A subtler attempt to extract knowledge from Davidson’s principle of charity exploits beliefs that one knows. Knowledge maximization implies that our ancestors had some primitive knowledge as soon as they had some primitive beliefs; it is not as though archaeology suggests otherwise. (shrink)

The possibility of justified true belief without knowledge is normally motivated by informally classified examples. This paper shows that it can also be motivated more formally, by a natural class of epistemic models in which both knowledge and justified belief are represented. The models involve a distinction between appearance and reality. Gettier cases arise because the agent's ignorance increases as the gap between appearance and reality widens. The models also exhibit an epistemic asymmetry between good and bad cases that sceptics (...) seem to ignore or deny. (shrink)

What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...) Safety is modal, not probabilistic, in structure, with closure and factiveness conditions. It is modelled using closeness of worlds. Safety is analogous to knowledge. It suggests an interpretation of possible worlds semantics for epistemic logic. To avoid logical omniscience, a relation of epistemic counterparthood between formulas is introduced. This supports a safety conception of knowledge and formalizes how extending knowledge by deduction depends on logical competence. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemology has been moving away from classical foundationalism—the thesis that our empirical knowledge is grounded in perceptual beliefs we know with certainty. McGrew reexamines classical foundationalism and offers a compelling reconstruction and defense of empirical knowledge grounded in perceptual certainty. He articulates and defends a new version of foundationalism and demonstrates how it meets all the standard criticisms. The book offers substantial rebuttals of the arguments of Kuhn and Rorty and demonstrates the value of the classical analytic approach to (...) philosophy. 'Foundations' will interest philosophers of science, language, and the mind. (shrink)